Fatherhood Wandering in the Land of Nod

Behind the high walls and razor wire of American prisons, the most visible and deeply felt deprivation and longing is not just for freedom, but also for fatherhood.

June 11, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Nikolai Petrovich went out to meet (his son, Arkady) in the garden and, upon approaching the arbor, suddenly overheard the rapid footsteps and voices of two young men. They were walking on the other side of the arbor and could not see him. Nikolai Petrovich hid.

‘You don’t know my father well enough,’ said Arkady. ‘Your father is a good man,’ Bazarov said ‘but he is antiquated; his song has been sung.’

Nikolai Petrovich listened more intently. Arkady made no reply. The ‘antiquated’ man stood there without moving for a few minutes, and then slowly made his way home.”

— Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

Once upon a time, when Beyond These Stone Walls was in its earliest existence, I wrote a post about the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain first appears in Scripture in the Book of Genesis (4:1). Having given birth to the first human born of a woman, Eve declared, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” It was great, of course, that Eve acknowledged the role of the Lord in this, but some have erroneously interpreted this to mean that no role at all is to be attributed to Adam. Just seven verses later, Cain has murdered his brother, Abel, and is exiled to wander in the Land of Nod, East of Eden. In only 11 verses in the fourth chapter in the Book of Genesis Cain is conceived, born, grows up, and murders his brother Abel. The Lord said to Cain:

“The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the earth. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth … . Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.”

— Genesis 4:1-12, 16

The Land of Nod is also where I wander now. The word, Nod, (or “Nad”) in Hebrew means to wander. In the story of Cain, he is disenfranchised not only from the family of man but is also to be deprived of the fatherhood of God. The story is not told in Scripture as a justification of eternal punishment, but rather it sets the stage for the most visible, hurtful, and deeply felt deprivation, not just for the demise of freedom but also the demise of fatherhood. And it is felt as well far beyond these stone walls. Humanity is weaker for its absence.

You have probably, at some time in your life, heard of a term in modern philosophy called “nihilism.” It comes from the Latin word, “nihil” which means “nothing.” You may have seen the term, “Nihil Obstat” on the title pages of Catholic books. It is the mark of a censor noting that “nothing objectionable” to faith is found in the book.

An English derivative is the word, “annihilate,” which means to reduce to nothing. Nihilism was a movement in philosophy that began in mid 19th-century Russia. It scorned authority and tradition and promoted radical change in society. Its adherents believed that tradition, reason, and family systems lent nothing to humanity except bondage. Its agenda was to end Christian influence and to render obsolete the faith of our fathers … and even our fathers themselves. We can readily see in this the roots of Socialism, when the State becomes our father and the Nation our Fatherland.

When nihilism paved the road to Communism, Christianity was its greatest threat. The term first appeared in literature in the 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons by Russian novelist Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. His principal character, Bazarov, introduced nihilism to Western minds by rendering fatherhood and tradition obsolete. The sad excerpt atop this post set the stage for that story.

One result of the slow but steady annihilation of fatherhood in our culture was what the world witnessed in Ireland several years ago. The Irish “Pro Choice” referendum to repeal a 1983 Constitutional amendment banning abortion reflected not only the diminishment of respect for life but also the diminishment of fatherhood, and even life itself. A natural development of that diminishment has been the growth of assisted suicide, such as in the bill just passed in New York State, but not yet signed into law.

All the language and rhetoric preceding the Irish vote was dominated by the same terms that swept America in the wake of the 1973 decision in “Roe v. Wade”: “a woman’s right to choose,” “a woman’s reproductive rights,” and “my body, my choice.” The right to life itself fell silently away, and along with it, the partnership of fatherhood also fell silently away — or perhaps rather was “silenced.” All of this rhetoric went itself to the diminishment not only of the right to life, but also the right to fatherhood.

Many readers had asked me to write about this, and I did so in several posts. Since 1973 when the United States Supreme Court issued its deeply divided vote affirming Roe v. Wade, American voices of respect for life have grown thunderous despite being largely silenced by the mainstream news media and our increasingly socialist politics of the left. That has now changed and that change is reflected in two important posts at this blog: “After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul,” and “The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade.” The latter post examined how the demise of fatherhood rendered almost meaningless the role of African American fathers and their “right” to fatherhood.

The Fallout from Absent Fathers

The photograph atop this section, presents some faces familiar to many of our readers. All of them were prisoners who did the hard work of reclaiming their lives from the Purgatory of prison. In the center is the one most familiar to readers. It is Pornchai Max Moontri who was Valedictorian for his high school graduation class for the prison’s Special School District in 2012. His story is told in a multitude of posts, including “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” To the far left is Evenor Pineda, whose rising star in freedom was told in “Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift.” To the rear and right of Pornchai is Alberto Ramos, a story told in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.”

The stories of each of these young men, who have paid in full any debt to society that they owed, are characterized most especially by the absence of fathers in their lives. This is not just a crisis for the right to life, but for the right to manhood, and the right to fatherhood. Something amazing has taken place in the United States of late, and is hopefully spreading throughout the Western world. Men are only now rising up to respond to the diminishment of both manhood and fatherhood. Since 1973 or so, men had drifted from embracing traditional roles as fathers and leaders. The six young men above are striking examples of the great harm caused by that diminishment. The trend had for too long been for men to remain silent on this issue, going gently into that good night instead of standing up to rage, rage against the dying of the light. The most natural expression of manhood in our culture has been fatherhood, and when manhood fades so does fatherhood. If fades with disastrous consequences. There is a direct and alarming correlation between the explosive growth of America’s prison population and growing up without direction from an attentive, involved, and nurturing father. Even elephants have figured this out, and we have failed to take the hint.

Who can look at the photo above and conclude that these are evil men not worthy of redemption? Evil is found here in abundance, but these young men have, with just a little help, placed all their newfound energy as men into repelling it.

There are other realities involved in the fact that prisons are now replacing parents in the upbringing of large numbers of discarded adolescent and young adult men. The sentences judges impose have grown longer to reflect the politics of tough-on-crime agendas like those promoted in the 1990s Clinton Crime Bill. It has not gone without notice that former President Joe Biden, on the very eve of leaving office, pardoned a convicted federal judge in Pennsylvania whose “Kids for Cash” scheme enriched him with kickbacks after sending a multitude of adolescents into the prison system illegally. What is the message sent by such a betrayal which most of the news media simply passed over without comment? What was the message sent when the President showered mercy upon that betrayal while showing none whatsoever to the young men betrayed?

Prisons have also burgeoned with the closing of services and facilities that once housed the mentally ill. Now they are warehoused in prisons instead of state-funded hospitals and treatment centers. The most devastating factor is the massive increase in drug traffic and drug addiction throughout America and especially throughout American prisons. Growing numbers of young men who came into the prison system without a drug problem are leaving with one.

Regardless of the demographics of crime and punishment, the people who are coming to prison in mindless, aimless droves all have this one thing in common. Eighty to ninety percent of them grew up in fatherless environments. Without reinventing the wheel, I wrote about this phenomenon in a Father’s Day 2012 post that was recently cited for “The Best of the Catholic Web” in the National Catholic Register. That article was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men” linked again at the end of this post.

That article struck a chord with readers who know experientially that the story it tells is true. Here is another staggering statistic about these young men. In 2008, 1,070 of them were granted parole to serve the remainder of their sentences under public supervision. By 2010, over 500 of them were back in prison for either parole violations or new offenses. What about the victims of these new crimes? What other publicly funded endeavor could exhibit a fifty percent failure rate, and still function as “business as usual”? Until we acknowledge that very often one of the victims of a crime is also the perpetrator, no effective intervention can take place in lives ruined by absent or, far worse, abusive fathers, and the addictions caused by attempts to medicate that loss.

Prison has become not only something that will teach them any lesson to prevent future bad acts. Despite many efforts at rehabilitation, our overcrowded and understaffed prisons have become merely something that young men must somehow survive. Prison has become a place where they are more likely than not to encounter the polar opposite of what they need most.

Jordan Peterson’s Summons to Manhood

In some recent posts, I have recommended a book that, I am glad to see, is still on the “Best Seller” lists. Canadian psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson, was described by Wesley Lang in Esquire magazine as being, “on a crusade to save masculinity.” That itself may explain why, in the liberal culture of Canada’s progressive politics, Jordan Peterson had been all but silenced.

I first wrote of him in a reflection on a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan. Her January 27, 2018 column was entitled, “Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?” Formerly associate professor of psychology at Harvard, Jordan Peterson taught psychology at the University of Toronto for 20 years. Ms. Noonan wrote about his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Peggy Noonan was intrigued because the interviewer was critical of Professor Peterson for his resistance to adopting the new orthodoxy of political correctness. Peggy Noonan summarized that the interviewer tried to silence Peterson’s…

“Scholarly respect for the stories and insights into human behavior — into the meaning of things — in the Old and New Testaments. ‘Their stories exist for a reason,’ he says, ‘and have lasted for a reason.’ They are powerful indicators of reality, and their great figures point to pathways.”

Men and women are different, Peterson says, and men should resist becoming “androgenized.” Progressive critics have attacked him repeatedly — probably a good sign that he’s on the right track — and some have labeled him an “alt-right reactionary.” But that is far from true and was leveled by the same crowd that would warehouse your sons in prison just to hide the evidence of what radical feminism has visited upon us and them. As Peterson writes,

“When softness and harmlessness become the only acceptable virtues, a man will start to act like an overgrown child.”

I now live among many of them. This is how bullies are created, and they are the very antithesis of what manhood should be. They grow up to make horrible fathers — and then absent ones — if indeed they grow up at all.

So, wake up, men! Get your heads back in the game. And get your butts back in church, and bring your sons with you! You have no idea of the devastation your absence has wrought.

“Prisons cannot replace fathers. At best new prisons constitute an expensive endgame strategy for quarantining some of the consequences of fatherlessness. It is not an act of justice. It is an admission of failure, of the retreat of men.”

— David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America Confronting our Most Urgent Social Problem, p 32

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Over past years, we have maintained a Facebook page for this blog. A number of Catholic groups there have expressed gratitude for our posts. About two months ago some anonymous person at Facebook decided that our posts with Catholic content are “SPAM.” Now Facebook blocks our attempts to post. So we cannot share this post on Facebook, but you can, and we hope you will.

Meanwhile BTSW still maintains pages at LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest and Gloria.tv, all of which gladly accept and promote our posts. You may follow us if you wish at any of these sites.

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

• Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

• Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

• In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Duty of a Priest: Father Frank Pavone and Priests for Life

In a bombshell report, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and the most visible pro-life priest in America has been dismissed from the priesthood by Pope Francis.

December 18, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: In a bombshell report that I learned of only today it seems that Fr. Frank Pavone, Director of Priests for Life and the most visible pro-life cleric in North America has been dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis. At this juncture, the dismissal is both inconceivable and unexplained. Fr. George David Byers wrote of it with some attachments today.

I plan to postpone further comment on this troubling development for pro-life Catholics until there is further clarification from Rome, if ever. Of interest, I wrote this post about Fr. Frank Pavone and his struggles eleven years ago. Much that I described in this post has now come to pass. I have never been more sorrowful for being right. Please pray for Fr. Pavone and Priests for Life.

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For about a year now, Beyond These Stone Walls has had a link to Priests for Life, one of the strongest and most vocal pro-life organizations with oversight from the Catholic Church. So when news began to circulate that Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life since 1993, was “recalled” to his diocese — the Diocese of Amarillo — I paid attention, as did many.

Before commenting on the justice or injustice of what has occurred to date in this matter, however, I must comment on the context. It has become clear to me even from behind these stone walls that not all is as it seems. Generally, a matter such as this would generate some dialogue within the Church, perhaps even in the Catholic media, but that would be the extent of its interest. This matter between Father Frank Pavone and Amarillo Bishop Patrick Zurek, however, has also become fodder for comments in the secular media providing fuel for the speculation and controversy now surrounding Father Pavone.

What exactly is the controversy? Father Frank Pavone has been recalled to his diocese, the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas, by his bishop. Father Pavone has been neither suspended nor disciplined for any cause. A Catholic News Service account included some clarification of this by Msgr. Harold Waldow, Vicar for Clergy in the Diocese of Amarillo:

“Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, remains a priest in good standing in the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas. … Msgr. Harold Waldow told CNS that Bishop Patrick J. Zurek only suspended Father Pavone’s ministry outside of the diocese because the well-known pro-life priest is needed for work in Amarillo.”

— Catholic News Service, Sept. 14, 2011

But there remains some taint upon Father Pavone. This matter between a priest and his bishop has become a matter of public dispute, and that itself is a violation of Father Pavone’s rights under Church law. After writing a letter to the nation’s bishops describing his suspension of Father Pavone’s ministry outside his own diocese, the bishop reportedly released the letter publicly. That seems to be what sparked their differences thrusting this matter into a public forum, but without any clear allegation of wrongdoing.

Brian Fraga wrote an informative article about this in Our Sunday Visitor (“Pro-life priest ‘baffled’ by bishop’s shutdown,” OSV, October 2, 2011). He cited the broad support that has emerged for Father Pavone including from the Priests for Life Board of Directors, from the National Pro-Life Council, and other corners. Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Rev. Martin Luther King and a staunch pro-life advocate, has released a powerfully supportive statement about Father Pavone and Priests for Life.

I have believed from the outset that the hype about all this has little to do with Father Frank Pavone and Bishop Zurek. It has to do with Priests for Life and its vocally Catholic pro-life stance. There is an agenda out there — an agenda with tentacles that have reached deeply into the arena of Catholic life — that would be encouraged by the diminishment or outright destruction of the Church’s pro-life ministry. In this entire matter, it is not only Father Pavone whose reputation is on the line. It is also the Church’s pro-life stance, consistently undermined by those who want compromise with a secular agenda in the culture war.

The demise of Priests for Life would be a great trophy for that agenda. I am no conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help notice that this story is unfolding nationally just as a Presidential Primary is taking shape, and the culture war is gearing up for battle.

Resisting Secular Sabotage

In a chapter entitled “Self-Sabotage: Catholicism” in his book, Secular Sabotage (Faith Words, 2009), Catholic League President Bill Donohue pointed out that dissent in the Church’s pro-life ministry is not as simple as some trendy left-wing Catholics promoting abortion. Very few people of even the remotest Christian persuasion actually promote abortion as a societal good. What Bill Donohue pointed out was something much more subtle. There is a growing consensus among left-wing Catholics that the Church has simply lost the battle for life and should just move on.

Please note here that I do not use the term “left-wing Catholics” in any derogatory sense. I spent much of my life and ministry squarely in that camp. So did Father Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal Avery Dulles, two exemplary Churchmen to whose memory we have dedicated Beyond These Stone Walls. Their drift to the right is far more a story of their embracing the great adventure of orthodoxy to the Magisterial authority of the Church — an authority that took precedence for them above any trendy political ideology.

My own drift away from the left followed their same example. It marked the official end of my adolescence that the life of the Church took precedence over my own sometimes highly misinformed publicly dissenting points of view.

Part of the agenda among the more radical wing of the Catholic left has been to get about the business of removing any Magisterial authority from our faith experience. The goal is to  carve out a distinctly American Catholic church with identifiably American Catholic values that mirror the now disintegrating American wing of the Church of England, the Episcopal church. But that’s a whole other blog post for some other day — such as next week, perhaps.

It’s time for American Catholic liberals to see and admit that their own views and causes are being hijacked by this radical wing. For them, organizations like Priests for Life are seen as an anachronistic hindrance to social progress. A nice little scandal undermining Priests for Life would be most welcomed in some circles right about now, not least among them some purportedly Catholic circles.

But there isn’t a scandal. Father Frank Pavone has not been accused of anything, though I do worry about his extreme vulnerability. There are agendas at work even in our Church that would be bolstered by the destruction of Father Pavone, his career, and his reputation. That fact must be a part of the equation as Catholics evaluate this story. Father Frank Pavone first was a target long before he was a suspect.

I have a personal example of how this works right here at Beyond These Stone Walls. For over two years now, BTSW has presented the views of a priest claiming to be falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned. So much of what I have written has been in direct confrontation with the agendas and claims of victim groups like SNAP and Catholic “reform” groups like Voice of the Faithful. Some of my postings about the Catholic League report, “SNAP Exposed” have been confrontational. My three-part series, “When Priests Are Falsely Accused” made a very controversial case for why accusers should be named. Nothing flies in the face of the cult of victimhood like that particular point of view.

But very few people disagreed with me or attacked these statements and positions. At first, I wondered if these controversial posts were even noticed, but then I learned they were widely disseminated. Even the Spanish-language news network, Univision, posted links to “When Priests Are Falsely Accused” on their website, as did National Public Radio and many international secular sites. Very few people disagreed with me or attacked these posts.

The very worst attack — though a rather wimpy one — was a one-line comment from SNAP director, David Clohessy. Commenting on the Spero News version of my BTSW post, “Due Process for Accused Priests?” David Clohessy called me “a dangerous and demented man.” Maybe he didn’t read “Sticks and Stones: My Incendiary Blog Post on Catholic Civil Discourse.”

But in contrast to the lack of any real attacks on Beyond These Stone Walls was a barrage of nasty e-mail attacks when I posted a clearly pro-life article, “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life” last January. I got clobbered. Some of the messages called me all sorts of names, denounced Beyond These Stone Walls, and denigrated those who assist me as its editors. It was perfectly okay with these people if I remind Catholics that some priests are falsely accused and some Americans are wrongly imprisoned. But how dare I use a Catholic blog to post a reasoned and thoughtful defense of the Catholic Church’s pro-life position and why it should not be compromised?

So that’s it then. I can write that a lot of men and women have committed fraud by falsely accusing Catholic priests of decades-old abuses. I can write that some of our bishops have been unwittingly complicit in this fraud and have left their priests vulnerable by blindly settling virtually every claim. I can even write that some of the purported “victims” are in fact criminals who should have their names and their claims exposed before any real due process and justice can take place. Not many on the left or right had much to say in response to any of that. But when I wrote about why abortion is a basic civil rights issue, some Catholics called me a “predator priest who should be silenced by the Church.” One writer called for prison officials to confiscate my typewriter.

It all reminded me of a troubling conversation I had with a prisoner two years ago. He was a career criminal; a gangster, a thief and a thug, who came to my  door one day. “I have a question,” he said:

“Can you explain to me why all these Catholics can say they are protecting children when they scream about 30 or 40 year old claims of child abuse, but then have nothing to say about the fourteen million American babies sacrificed in abortions in just the last decade?”

It’s a hard question for which I have no answer. But I explained to him that no one in our Church will call him a gangster, a thief, or a thug unless he asks a question like that too loudly.

This was when I really came to admire Father Frank Pavone. I became aware of how visible the target on his back really is. As I wrote two weeks ago at the end of “Thy Brother’s Keeper,” I bow to Father Pavone’s faithful witness to both the truth and to his duty as a priest which is to preserve both his obligations and his rights under Church law. The bottom line is that anyone who thinks his bishop is going to protect his rights has not been paying attention in the last ten years.

Bishops as Prosecutors

I cannot speak to the internal disagreements between Father Frank Pavone and Bishop Patrick Zurek. I know none of the details. But I can speak in a broader sense of the necessity for any priest in the current climate to preserve his rights under Church law. I can only relate some of what transpired with my own bishop in a canonical proceeding to shed light on some of what may be happening behind the scenes in the Diocese of Amarillo.

Father Pavone came under recent attack in some circles because his bishop scheduled a personal meeting which Father Pavone declined to attend. There were some people — some very well intentioned — who saw in this some shades of culpability on the part of Father Pavone, using it to cast suspicion on his own transparency and desire to cooperate with his bishop.

It is likely, however, that Bishop Zurek has declined to allow a meeting to take place with Father Pavone’s Canonical Advocate present. I do not know this for certain, but I have read that Father Pavone’s Canonical Advocate has requested mediation in this matter between Father Pavone and his bishop. It was apparently on the advice of the Advocate that Father Pavone declined to meet without his Advocate or a mediator present. Both Father Pavone and his Canonical Advocate, Father David Deibel, J.D., J.C.L. have come under some public fire for this.

Church Law insists that any priest in a canonical forum has a right to advocacy. I stand by what I wrote in “Thy Brother’s Keeper’:

“I bow also to Father Pavone’s resolve to protect his rights under the higher authority of the law of the Church, for the [Dallas] Charter makes one thing clear now: Some bishops will neither protect nor respect those rights.”

I speak from experience. Throughout the last decade of attempting to defend myself before both a court of law and a court of public opinion, I have also had to simultaneously defend myself against a one-sided effort by my bishop to bring about a canonical dismissal from the priesthood with no defense whatsoever offered by me. Throughout this process, my bishop has steadfastly refused to meet or even converse with my Canonical Advocate regarding the matter of preserving my rights under Church law.

Far worse, when my bishop learned that I am seeking an opportunity to bring forward a new appeal of my conviction, my bishop hired his own lawyers to conduct a secret evaluation of my trial to present in Rome and circumvent my own efforts to defend myself. He has repeatedly refused to share with me or my Canonical Advocate the findings of that secret assessment.

My bishop has acted throughout in the role of a prosecutor, but it’s even worse than that.  In America, prosecutors are required to turn over to the defense the nature of charges and any evidence that supports them.  When I tried to assert my rights under Church law in this matter, my bishop responded with silence and has remained silent ever since.

I believe I could safely say that every organization formed on behalf of priests to assist in protecting their rights under Canon Law would now state that no priest in even a hint of an adversarial circumstance with his bishop should ever agree to a one-on-one meeting without his Canonical Advocate present. It would not only be foolish, it could be destructive. It would be akin to a prosecutor demanding to meet privately with a defendant without his lawyer present.

As the priesthood crisis became critical in 2002, Cardinal Avery Dulles gave bishops and priests a clear reminder of their rights and obligations under Church law.  His fine article, “The Rights of Accused Priests” is reprinted under “Articles” on Beyond These Stone Walls. Given these rights and obligations, I admire that Father Pavone is determined to resolve this matter in unity with his bishop. No bishop can in justice order him or any priest to set aside his rights under Church law.

Complicating my own comments on this matter is the fact that Father Frank Pavone and I have the same Canonical Advocate in the person of Father David L. Deibel, J.D., J.C.L. who has broad training and experience in both civil and Church law. He, of course, has not discussed the Father Pavone matter with me at all. He is an accomplished professional motivated by the law and an impeccable set of ethics.

But Father Deibel has come under some highly unjust fire because of his advocacy for me. Some have used this to try to impugn his reputation and undermine Father Pavone’s own canonical defense. In truth, Father David Deibel was the sole Church official to appear at my trial and sentencing over seventeen years ago. He traveled from California at his own expense to do this. At the time I was sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to 67 years in prison, Father David Deibel was one of only two people in that courtroom with the moral courage and personal integrity to speak the truth, despite knowing that there was a price to pay for it. Father David Deibel was one of the heroes in my case, and the extent to which this is true will very soon be placed into public view. There is a lot more to come in this regard, and it is indeed coming.

Meanwhile, the Church owes Father Frank Pavone the right of defense — and respect, support, and encouragement for his tireless voice on behalf of those who have been denied one. Click here for Father Frank Pavone updates.

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

A prematurely leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft may send a polarized nation to the brink of civil war, but Roe v. Wade is not the first precedent to be overturned.

May 11, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

KA-BOOM! For many months, the U.S. Supreme Court has been examining a case from the State of Mississippi. It is one of the most widely anticipated abortion rights cases in decades, and it could result in the termination of a federal constitutional right to abortion established in the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

In early May, a draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to and published by Politico. It is the first time in history that a draft of a pending Supreme Court decision was leaked to the media before it made its way through the Court’s decision-making process. The leaked draft leaves a distinct impression that the Court is (or was) about to overturn Roe V. Wade. The leak was an earthquake for government, the Supreme Court, and advocacy groups on both sides of the abortion issue.

Chief Justice John Roberts immediately requested an investigation of the unprecedented leak. I hope that by the time this is posted, the perpetrator(s) and process through which it was leaked are exposed. Explosions of furor over this in Washington are not exaggerated. The integrity of justice, the Supreme Court, the Separation of Powers, and government itself are at stake.

And there was another, simultaneous explosion, a nuclear one with a mushroom cloud spreading across this divided nation. The leaked news that Roe v. Wade may now be overturned has created a tidal wave of protest outside the Supreme Court and in cities across the land. On the left, the partisan protests are taking an unfortunate tone of vile hostility toward the pro-life movement, toward politicians who have been in sympathy with it, and toward Catholics who have traditionally been a driving force behind the Right to Life.

We should be proud of our defense of life while also avoiding any rhetoric of “we won and you lost!” The only potential winners here are the unborn who may have a chance to live if this leaked document becomes our reality. That is still likely months away.

President Joe Biden, who ran for office on a pledge to unite this polarized nation, has stoked the raging fires by denouncing the Court and calling for abortion rights to now be encoded in federal law. He knows full well that this is highly unlikely in the current divided House and Senate so his rhetoric can only be interpreted as an effort to ratchet up dissent and chaos.

In 2006, as Senator Joe Biden he backed an amendment to overturn Roe. Two years later, he became Vice President in the Obama White House. I can only interpret his radical flip, and his current hostility to the Right to Life, as evidence of a widely held belief that someone else has been doing his thinking for him on this and other crucial issues facing Americans. This is not a good time for the United States to have a puppet presidency.

The leaked document does not represent a final position of the Court, but it appears to have been written for the majority opinion. Whether leaking it was an attempt at sabotage remains to be seen. But the text of Justice Alito’s majority decision draft gives much hope to the pro-life cause.

A Misguided Emphasis on Precedent

The leaked draft affirms that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion and that no such right is implicit in any of its provisions. The draft states that there is no history or tradition that protects abortion as a right with a Constitutional guarantee of due process. This mirrors the position of the late Justice Antonin Scalia who held that the only such right found in the Constitution is the one that the (7-2) majority Court in Roe invented and inserted there in 1973. The draft concludes that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, its reasoning exceptionally weak, and with damaging consequences.”

In defending Roe, a lot of ink and rhetoric have been spilled over a legal principle known as “Stare Decisis,” a Latin term literally meaning “to stand by things decided.” The legal principle compels a court to stand by precedents for matters in which the same legal points arise in litigation. You likely heard the term, “respect for precedent” a lot in the Senate hearings vetting recent nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Without exception, the precedent case referred to in these hearings was the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The ruling barred states from adopting restrictions on abortion before the third trimester which was the point at which the Court determined in 1973 to be the time of viability of life outside the womb. The scientific evidence no longer supports that determination.

The principle of “Stare Decisis” does not mean that a precedent is set in stone with no avenue for reconsideration just because it is a precedent. There have been ten cases in U.S. Supreme Court history that have widely become known as “Landmark Precedents.” One of them is Roe v. Wade which had the effect of bitterly dividing the nation into two warring camps thus giving birth to the Pro-life Movement. Each year since 1975, two years after Roe, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens descend upon Washington for the National March for Life.

Another precedent also bitterly divided the nation setting in motion the events which led to the Civil War. That case was Scott v. Sanford, an 1857 landmark decision and the one that has been most compared by judicial scholars to the flawed judgment in Roe v. Wade.

In 1846, Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, Missouri, sued contending that he, his wife, Harriet, and their two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom because their “owner” brought them to Missouri which was a free state. After being tried in Missouri state courts and in federal circuit court, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856. In 1857, the Court issued its 7-2 split decision rejecting Dred Scott’s claims.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney, like Joe Biden a self-identified Rosary-carrying Catholic, ruled that “blacks, even when free, could never be citizens of the United States” with rights to sue in federal courts. In his written decision — one that no person of just mind and well informed conscience could hold today — Justice Taney concluded that “blacks are so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Taney decision for the Court majority — which, like Roe v. Wade, was also split 7-2 — also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in territories north and west of the state of Missouri was unconstitutional. The outcome of Dred Scott v. Sanford led directly to the Civil War.

To claim today that “precedent” alone should be the determining factor in such a case is tantamount to stoking the embers of that war. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery and paved the way for the Fourteenth Amendment which recognized the rights to life and liberty for all Americans. Those who would cling to “Stare Decisis” as an impenetrable judicial boundary are left today in a misinformed judicial quandary.

As the final fate of Roe v. Wade looms, I urge readers to arm themselves with some truths beyond the hysteria of protests covered 24/7 by cable news. I would like to ask you to read at least one or more of the posts linked at the end of this one, to share them, and to pray ardently for the cause of life and the integrity of this nation.

Be prepared to duck because a political storm is rising. There is on its horizon a distinct impression that the integrity of America and the cause of life are not at all beyond hope.

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Please also read and share:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life